In 1809, David Mead Randolph of England patented machinery for riveting soles and heels to the uppers instead of sewing them together.
The celebrated civil engineer, Isambard M. Brunel, shortly thereafter added several machines of his own invention to Randolph’s method, and he established a large manufactory for the making chiefly of army shoes. The various separate processes performed by his machines involved the cutting out of the leather, hardening it by rolling, securing the welt on to the inner sole by small nails, and studding the outer sole with larger nails. Divisions of men were employed to work each separate step, and the shoes were passed from one process to another until complete.
Large quantities of shoes were made at reduced prices, but complaints were made as to the nails penetrating into the shoe and hurting the feet. The demand for army shoes fell off, and the system was abandoned; but it had incited invention in the direction of machine-made shoes and the day of exclusive hand labour was doomed.
About 1818 Joseph Walker of Hopkinston, Massachusetts invented the wooden peg. Making and applying pegs by hand was too slow work, and machines were at once contrived for making them. As one invention necessitates and begets others, so special forms of machines for sawing and working up wood into pegs were devised.
Such machinery was for first sawing the selected log of wood into slices across the grain a little thicker than the length of a peg and cutting out knots in the wood; then planing the head of the block smooth; grooving the block with a V-shaped cutting tool; splitting the pegs apart, and then bleaching, drying, polishing and winnowing them.
It took forty or fifty years to perfect these and kindred machines, but at the end of that time there was a factory at Burlington, Vermont, which from four cords of wood, made every day four hundred bushels of shoe pegs.
About 1858 B. F. Sturtevant of Massachusetts made a great improvement in this line. He was a very poor man, getting a living by pegging on the soles of a few pair of shoes each day. He devised a pegging machine, and out of his scanty earnings and at odd hours, with much pain and labour, and by borrowing money, he finally completed it. The machine made what was called “peg wood,” a long ribbon strip of seasoned wood, sharpened on one edge and designed to be fed into the machine for pegging shoes. The shoes were punctured by awls driven by machinery, and then as the peg strip was carried to it the machine severed the strip into chisel-edged pegs, and peg-driving mechanism drove them into the holes. Nine hundred pegs a minute were driven. It soon almost supplanted all other peg-driving machines, and after the machines were quite generally introduced, there were made in one year alone in New England fifty-five million pairs of boots and shoes pegged by the Sturtevant machines.
Other forms of pegs followed, such as the metal screw pegs, and machines to cut them off from a continuous spiral wire from which they were made. Lasts on which the shoes were made had been manufactured by the hundred thousand on the wood-turning lathes invented by Blanchard, described in the chapter on Wood-Working.
In 1858 also, about the same time the Sturtevant pegging machine was introduced, the shoe-sewing machine was developed. The McKay Shoe-Sewing Machine Co. of Massachusetts after an expenditure of $130,000, and three years’ time in experiments, were enabled to put their machines in practical operation. The pegging machines and sewing machines worked a revolution in shoemaking.
A revolution in the art of shoemaking thus started was followed up by wondrous machines invented to meet every part of the manufacture. Lasting machines for drawing and fitting the leather over lasts, in which the outer edges of the leather are drawn over the bottom of the last and tacked thereto by the hands and fingers of the machine instead of those of the human hand, were invented.